REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK
2020 Time Capsule
Carlos Barria / Reuters
Jonathan Ernst / ReutersThis afternoon, on the heels of a widely panned formal Oval Office address, Donald Trump assembled a group of scientific and corporate leaders to talk about dealing with the coronavirus. You can watch the whole thing on the White House YouTube channel.
I suspect that we’ll see one line from this conference played frequently in the months ahead. You can watch it starting at around 1:22:00, when reporter Kristen Welker of NBC asks Trump whether he takes responsibility for the lag in making test kits available.
Trump’s reply:
No.
I don’t take responsibility at all.
Narrowly parsed, and in full context, Trump was referring only to the test kits — and was continuing his (fantasized) complaint that rules left over from 2016, under the Obama administration, are the real reason the U.S. has been so slow to respond to this pandemic.
But filmable moments in politics are not always taken in full context, and at their most narrowly parsed logical reading:
“They cling to guns and religion”
“I voted for it, before I voted against it”
“Basket of deplorables”
“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”
“Stuff happens” (Donald Rumsfeld on the chaos of post-invasion Iraq)
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’, is.”
“Peace for our time.”
All of these—in full context, and most-sympathetically read—had a meaning you could understand and perhaps defend. None of that context or meaning survived, as those went from being phrases to weaponized symbols.
Will that happen to “I don’t take responsibility at all”? We will soon see.
Other stage business points:
A series of CEOs came to the microphone to describe what their companies were doing to speed testing or help out in other ways. Trump caught the first three or four of them unawares, by shaking their hands as they moved away from the podium. All seemed startled, as you can see in the video.
Then the other CEOs began to catch on, and a following group of them scuttled away from the podium before Trump could grab them for a handshake, or held their own hands clenched together, in a protective prayer-style grasp.
Finally, (at 1:06 in the video) you can see Bruce Greenstein, of the LHC group, surprise Trump with an elbow-bump rather than a hand shake. Trump himself seemed completely oblivious to the idea of social distancing. It was also notable that one speaker after another touched and moved around the same microphone, and put his her hands on the sides of the same podium.
I mentioned earlier today the uneasy and evolving position of Anthony Fauci, who has been the “voice of science” through this episode as he has during previous medical emergencies. The uneasiness lies in the tension between his decades as a respected scientist, and his current role as a prominent member of Team Trump. Can he retain his long reputation as a straight shooter? While maintaining any influence with Trump.
Make what you will of his body language through the events today. (He is at far left in the picture below.)
/media/img/posts/2020/03/Facui2/original.png)
White House
Also today, I mentioned the inevitable-for-Trump, though inconceivable-in-other-administrations, ritual of Trump subordinates limitlessly praising the goodness and wisdom of their leader. It was striking to see all the CEOs skipping right past that formality.
But if you felt a phantom-limb twinge in the absence of these comments, all you had to do was wait for Mike Pence. You can hear him starting at around 1:07, with comments that began “This day should be an inspiration to every American” and built in earnestness from there.
There was much more from the question-and-answer session, but I don’t want to spoil the experience of discovery for anyone who has not seen it yet.
Two hundred and thirty-five days until the election.
But if you felt a phantom-limb twinge in the absence of these comments, all you had to do was wait for Mike Pence. You can hear him starting at around 1:07, with comments that began “This day should be an inspiration to every American” and built in earnestness from there.
There was much more from the question-and-answer session, but I don’t want to spoil the experience of discovery for anyone who has not seen it yet.
Two hundred and thirty-five days until the election.
Leah Millis / Reuters
As of today, March 13, 2020—three-plus years into the current administration, three months into public awareness of the coronavirus spread, seven-plus months until before the next election—Anthony Fauci is playing a role in which no previous Trump-era figure has survived.
One other person has been in the spot Fauci now occupies. That is, of course, James Mattis, the retired four-star Marine Corps general and former secretary of defense for Trump. Former is the key word here, and the question is whether the change in circumstances between Mattis’s time and Fauci’s—the public nature of this emergency, the greater proximity of upcoming elections, the apparent verdict from financial markets and both international and domestic leaders that Donald Trump is in deep over his head—will give Fauci the greater leverage he needs, not just to stay at work but also to steer policy away from the abyss.
Why is Anthony Fauci now, even more than James Mattis before him, in a different position from any other publicly visible associate of Trump’s?
Pre-Trump credibility, connections, and respect. Fauci has been head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at the National Institutes of Health, since Ronald Reagan’s first term, in 1984. (How can he have held the post so long? Although nothing in his look or bearing would suggest it, Fauci is older than either Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden. He recently turned 79.)
Through his long tenure at NIH, which spanned the early days of the HIV/AIDS devastation and later experience with the SARS and H1N1 epidemics, Fauci has become a very familiar “public face of science,” explaining at congressional hearings and in TV and radio interviews how Americans should think about the latest threat. He has managed to stay apart from any era’s partisan-political death struggles. He has received a raft of scientific and civic honors, from the Lasker Award for health leadership, to the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by George W. Bush.
Thus, in contrast to virtually all the other figures with whom Trump has surrounded himself, Fauci is by any objective standard the best person for the job — and is universally seen as such. This distinguishes him from people Trump has favored in his own coterie, from longtime consigliere Michael Cohen to longtime ally Roger Stone to longtime personal physician Harold Bornstein; and from past and present members of his White House staff, like the departed Michael Flynn and the returned Hope Hicks and the sempiternal Jared Kushner; and fish-out-of-water Cabinet appointees, like (to pick one) the neurosurgeon Ben Carson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Put another way: Very plainly, Trump needs Fauci more than Fauci needs Trump. This is not a position Donald Trump has ever felt comfortable in— witness the denouement with Mattis.
The ability not to abase himself before Trump. The first Cabinet meeting Donald Trump held, nearly three years ago, was unlike any other conducted in U.S. history, and very much like subsequent public appearance of Trump in company with his appointees.
In that meeting, on June 12, 2017, as TV cameras were rolling, Trump went around the table and one-by-one had his appointees gush about how kind, wise, and far-sighted he was—failing only to compliment him on his humility. (Tina Nguyen described the meeting at the time in Vanity Fair.) After praising himself, Trump called on others to praise him, starting with the reliable Mike Pence. “It is the greatest privilege of my life to serve as the vice president to a president who is keeping his word to the American people,” Pence began. All the others followed his example—with the prominent exception of Mattis. He spent his “praise” time instead complimenting the men and women in uniform he led.
No public event like that Cabinet meeting had happened before in the United States, simply because no other president has been as needy for in-public adulation as Trump is. Of course most politicians and all presidents are needy; you could not run for the presidency if you had a normal temperament. (Background reading on this point, while you’re “socially isolating”: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.) Every political leader eats up the praise in private—“Wonderful job today, Mr. President—you were really connecting!”, not to mention Veep—but all the rest of them have been savvy enough to know how tacky this looks in public. The modern exception-illustrating-the-rule might have been Lyndon Johnson, with enough of the Sun King in his makeup to enjoy having people humble themselves before him. But holding a public adulation-fest? If George W. Bush had heard, say, Karl Rove start in that way, he would likely have said, “OK, Turd Blossom, what are you angling for?” Barack Obama—or John F. Kennedy, or Jimmy Carter— would have arched an eyebrow as if to ask, “Hey, did you think you were still playing in the minors?”
But what we saw in that Cabinet meeting, we have seen again and again from those around Trump. The most humiliating recent examples come from the people in charge of the coronavirus response: Pence again; Alex Azar, head of Health and Human Services; Robert Redfield, head of the Centers for Disease Control; and Seema Verma, in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. The beginnings and endings of their public statements, and the answers to many questions, are larded with praise for Trump and his “decisive and visionary action.” (For the latest example, see Verma under questioning from Martha MacCallum of Fox News. Verma repeatedly dodges MacCallum’s direct question about whether hospitals have enough ventilators and other supplies (as Fred Barbash laid out in the Washington Post. MacCallum makes one last try—and Verma seeks refuge in saying, “And that’s why the president has taken such a bold and decisive action.” That claim made no logical sense to MacCallum or the listeners, but it reflected the inescapable logic of what is expected from members of the Court of Trump.)
There is one exception: Anthony Fauci. He has occasionally said that he agrees with aspects of the administration’s or the president’s policies, but he has avoided the ritual self-abnegation. Of course Fauci held his job long before Trump came to town, and is not part of the normal round of high-level appointments each new administration makes. (To the best of my knowledge, though, directors of NIH institutes, like Fauci, serve “at the pleasure of the president” and so could be removed. If I’m wrong on that, will update.)
But Fauci’s polite but consistent reluctance to grovel cannot have gone unnoticed by the audience-of-one for all the other appointees: Trump himself.
Daring to contradict Trump, in public. This is a step beyond anything Mattis attempted. Through the first two years of the administration, background-sourced stories and reports based on “those in a position to know the Secretary’s thinking” laid out the increasing distance between Mattis’s view of American interests and what Trump was saying and doing.
But there is no precedent, from Mattis or anyone else, for what we have seen these past few weeks from Fauci at the podium. Is the coronavirus problem just going to go away (as Trump had claimed)? No, from Fauci. It is serious, and it is going to get worse. Is the testing system “perfect” (as Trump had claimed)? No, it is not working as it should. Is the U.S. once again the greatest of all nations in its response to the threat? No, it is behind in crucial aspects, and has much to learn from others.
Fauci is saying all these things politely and respectfully. As an experienced Washington operator he knows that there is no reason to begin an answer with, “The president is wrong.” You just skip to the next sentence, “The reality is...” But his meaning—“the president is wrong”—is unmistakable.
Anthony Fauci has earned the presumption-of-credibility for his comments. Donald Trump has earned the presumption that he is lying or confused. A year ago that standoff—the realities, versus Trump-world obeisance—worked out against James Mattis. Will the balance of forces be different for Fauci? As of this writing, no one can know.
2020 Time Capsule #1: Four Ways Trump’s Oval Office Address Failed![]()
As of today, March 13, 2020—three-plus years into the current administration, three months into public awareness of the coronavirus spread, seven-plus months until before the next election—Anthony Fauci is playing a role in which no previous Trump-era figure has survived.
One other person has been in the spot Fauci now occupies. That is, of course, James Mattis, the retired four-star Marine Corps general and former secretary of defense for Trump. Former is the key word here, and the question is whether the change in circumstances between Mattis’s time and Fauci’s—the public nature of this emergency, the greater proximity of upcoming elections, the apparent verdict from financial markets and both international and domestic leaders that Donald Trump is in deep over his head—will give Fauci the greater leverage he needs, not just to stay at work but also to steer policy away from the abyss.
Why is Anthony Fauci now, even more than James Mattis before him, in a different position from any other publicly visible associate of Trump’s?
Pre-Trump credibility, connections, and respect. Fauci has been head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at the National Institutes of Health, since Ronald Reagan’s first term, in 1984. (How can he have held the post so long? Although nothing in his look or bearing would suggest it, Fauci is older than either Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden. He recently turned 79.)
Through his long tenure at NIH, which spanned the early days of the HIV/AIDS devastation and later experience with the SARS and H1N1 epidemics, Fauci has become a very familiar “public face of science,” explaining at congressional hearings and in TV and radio interviews how Americans should think about the latest threat. He has managed to stay apart from any era’s partisan-political death struggles. He has received a raft of scientific and civic honors, from the Lasker Award for health leadership, to the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by George W. Bush.
Thus, in contrast to virtually all the other figures with whom Trump has surrounded himself, Fauci is by any objective standard the best person for the job — and is universally seen as such. This distinguishes him from people Trump has favored in his own coterie, from longtime consigliere Michael Cohen to longtime ally Roger Stone to longtime personal physician Harold Bornstein; and from past and present members of his White House staff, like the departed Michael Flynn and the returned Hope Hicks and the sempiternal Jared Kushner; and fish-out-of-water Cabinet appointees, like (to pick one) the neurosurgeon Ben Carson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Put another way: Very plainly, Trump needs Fauci more than Fauci needs Trump. This is not a position Donald Trump has ever felt comfortable in— witness the denouement with Mattis.
The ability not to abase himself before Trump. The first Cabinet meeting Donald Trump held, nearly three years ago, was unlike any other conducted in U.S. history, and very much like subsequent public appearance of Trump in company with his appointees.
In that meeting, on June 12, 2017, as TV cameras were rolling, Trump went around the table and one-by-one had his appointees gush about how kind, wise, and far-sighted he was—failing only to compliment him on his humility. (Tina Nguyen described the meeting at the time in Vanity Fair.) After praising himself, Trump called on others to praise him, starting with the reliable Mike Pence. “It is the greatest privilege of my life to serve as the vice president to a president who is keeping his word to the American people,” Pence began. All the others followed his example—with the prominent exception of Mattis. He spent his “praise” time instead complimenting the men and women in uniform he led.
No public event like that Cabinet meeting had happened before in the United States, simply because no other president has been as needy for in-public adulation as Trump is. Of course most politicians and all presidents are needy; you could not run for the presidency if you had a normal temperament. (Background reading on this point, while you’re “socially isolating”: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.) Every political leader eats up the praise in private—“Wonderful job today, Mr. President—you were really connecting!”, not to mention Veep—but all the rest of them have been savvy enough to know how tacky this looks in public. The modern exception-illustrating-the-rule might have been Lyndon Johnson, with enough of the Sun King in his makeup to enjoy having people humble themselves before him. But holding a public adulation-fest? If George W. Bush had heard, say, Karl Rove start in that way, he would likely have said, “OK, Turd Blossom, what are you angling for?” Barack Obama—or John F. Kennedy, or Jimmy Carter— would have arched an eyebrow as if to ask, “Hey, did you think you were still playing in the minors?”
But what we saw in that Cabinet meeting, we have seen again and again from those around Trump. The most humiliating recent examples come from the people in charge of the coronavirus response: Pence again; Alex Azar, head of Health and Human Services; Robert Redfield, head of the Centers for Disease Control; and Seema Verma, in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. The beginnings and endings of their public statements, and the answers to many questions, are larded with praise for Trump and his “decisive and visionary action.” (For the latest example, see Verma under questioning from Martha MacCallum of Fox News. Verma repeatedly dodges MacCallum’s direct question about whether hospitals have enough ventilators and other supplies (as Fred Barbash laid out in the Washington Post. MacCallum makes one last try—and Verma seeks refuge in saying, “And that’s why the president has taken such a bold and decisive action.” That claim made no logical sense to MacCallum or the listeners, but it reflected the inescapable logic of what is expected from members of the Court of Trump.)
There is one exception: Anthony Fauci. He has occasionally said that he agrees with aspects of the administration’s or the president’s policies, but he has avoided the ritual self-abnegation. Of course Fauci held his job long before Trump came to town, and is not part of the normal round of high-level appointments each new administration makes. (To the best of my knowledge, though, directors of NIH institutes, like Fauci, serve “at the pleasure of the president” and so could be removed. If I’m wrong on that, will update.)
But Fauci’s polite but consistent reluctance to grovel cannot have gone unnoticed by the audience-of-one for all the other appointees: Trump himself.
Daring to contradict Trump, in public. This is a step beyond anything Mattis attempted. Through the first two years of the administration, background-sourced stories and reports based on “those in a position to know the Secretary’s thinking” laid out the increasing distance between Mattis’s view of American interests and what Trump was saying and doing.
But there is no precedent, from Mattis or anyone else, for what we have seen these past few weeks from Fauci at the podium. Is the coronavirus problem just going to go away (as Trump had claimed)? No, from Fauci. It is serious, and it is going to get worse. Is the testing system “perfect” (as Trump had claimed)? No, it is not working as it should. Is the U.S. once again the greatest of all nations in its response to the threat? No, it is behind in crucial aspects, and has much to learn from others.
Fauci is saying all these things politely and respectfully. As an experienced Washington operator he knows that there is no reason to begin an answer with, “The president is wrong.” You just skip to the next sentence, “The reality is...” But his meaning—“the president is wrong”—is unmistakable.
Anthony Fauci has earned the presumption-of-credibility for his comments. Donald Trump has earned the presumption that he is lying or confused. A year ago that standoff—the realities, versus Trump-world obeisance—worked out against James Mattis. Will the balance of forces be different for Fauci? As of this writing, no one can know.
2020 Time Capsule #1: Four Ways Trump’s Oval Office Address Failed
Tom Brenner / Reuters March 12, 2020
Four years ago, when Donald Trump was on his rise—from apparent-joke candidate, to long-shot, to front-runner, to nominee, and on to electoral winner—I wrote in this space a series of “Trump Time Capsules.”
They started with #1, back in May, 2016, when a Paris-bound airliner plunged into the Mediterranean and Trump immediately declared that the cause must have been terrorism. “What just happened?” he shouted to a rally crowd before wreckage had even been found. “A plane got blown out of the sky. And if anybody thinks it wasn’t blown out of the sky, you’re 100 percent wrong, folks, OK? You’re 100 percent wrong.” (Naturally, French authorities later determined that the crash arose from a mechanical problem.)
They ended with installment #152, just before the election, at the time when James Comey’s last-minute reopening of the Hillary Clinton email case was dominating headlines. In between there were installments about Paul Manafort’s fishy-looking role, the “grab ‘em by...” moment, Trump’s comments about the “Mexican judge,” and the shift of one-time Trump ridiculers like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell into a Vichy Republican coalition.
Through all the posts, the idea was to record in real time what people knew about Donald Trump, about the country, and about the issues and stakes in the election, before any of us knew how the contest was going to turn out. As I wrote in introducing the very first installment four years ago:
People will wonder about America in our time. It can be engrossing to look back on dramatic, high-stakes periods in which people were not yet sure where things would lead, to see how they assessed the odds before knowing the outcome. The last few months of the 1968 presidential campaign: would it be Humphrey, Nixon, or conceivably even George Wallace? Or 1964: was there a chance that Goldwater might win? The impeachment countdown for Richard Nixon, in 1974? The Bush-Gore recount watch in 2000?
The Trump campaign this year will probably join that list. The odds are still against his becoming president, but no one can be sure what the next five-plus months will bring. Thus for time-capsule purposes, and not with the idea that this would change a single voter’s mind, I kick off what I intend as a regular feature. Its purpose is to catalogue some of the things Donald Trump says and does that no real president would do.
We are again in a not yet sure moment.
- About the upcoming election.
- About the unfolding-by-the-minute consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.
- About the recent collapse of the stock markets, and the less immediately visible, but ultimately far more damaging, economic and social effects of the sudden simultaneous collapse of the travel and lodging industries, of the live-events and sports and conference and entertainment businesses, of restaurants and bars, of taxis and trains, of stores in college towns, and of the impact of all of this on the people who unload baggage from airliners or clean rooms for hotel guests or work as security guards at museums or sell jerseys at baseball games. Such roles are not as resonant as “steelworkers” or “coal miners” in political or journalistic discourse, but these jobs collectively form a very large part of the economy, they’re very hard to do over the internet or “remotely,” and they’re being eliminated at a pace not seen in at least a dozen years, and probably since the 1930s.
We don’t know.
So behind our veil of ignorance about outcomes, this is another chronicle of what we knew and heard day by day, which I’ll intend to operate, as with the original series, through the upcoming election season.
Obviously I am skipping through what would be several decades’ worth of news in normal circumstances: impeachment, the Democratic primaries, the evisceration of legal norms, and so on down a long list.
Instead, for an arbitrary starting point, let’s begin with Trump’s Oval Office address last night on the virus threat. I have experience with this rhetorical form: I wrote a number of such addresses long ago when Jimmy Carter was president, and I have studied dozens of them in the intervening years.
This latest Trump speech was uniquely incompetent and inappropriate, and it’s worth noting why, as American voters decide whether to retain him in office.
One audience that Trump himself takes seriously—the world financial system—obviously took a dim view of his statement, as markets around the world headed sharply downward practically as soon as he began to talk. Of course, their view indirectly affects everyone else.
But from a political, rhetorical, and civic perspective, what was wrong with the speech? While watching it, I was assessing the speech by two standards: What it showed about Trump and his styles of thought, and what it showed about presidents and their roles in similar moments of stress.
As for Trump himself, his public vocabulary is strikingly limited on a deployable-word-count basis: “Many people are saying,” “it’s the greatest ever,” “we have tremendous people,” “very good things are happening,” “there has never been anything like it,” and of course “sir.”
Equally striking is the consistency, or narrowness, of the messages Trump delivers. A huge proportion of his entire discourse can be boiled down to two themes:
I am so great, and am doing a better job than anyone else ever has. (Biggest crowds, best economy, most loyal supporters, etc.)
Other people are such cheaters—and it is outrageous what they are trying to get away with. (They’re sending rapists; they’re behind on their NATO payments; they’re ripping us off in trade; etc.)
I won’t go through the whole classification of his discourse into these two categories, but nearly everything he said last night could be boiled down to one or the other of those themes.
Four years ago, when Donald Trump was on his rise—from apparent-joke candidate, to long-shot, to front-runner, to nominee, and on to electoral winner—I wrote in this space a series of “Trump Time Capsules.”
They started with #1, back in May, 2016, when a Paris-bound airliner plunged into the Mediterranean and Trump immediately declared that the cause must have been terrorism. “What just happened?” he shouted to a rally crowd before wreckage had even been found. “A plane got blown out of the sky. And if anybody thinks it wasn’t blown out of the sky, you’re 100 percent wrong, folks, OK? You’re 100 percent wrong.” (Naturally, French authorities later determined that the crash arose from a mechanical problem.)
They ended with installment #152, just before the election, at the time when James Comey’s last-minute reopening of the Hillary Clinton email case was dominating headlines. In between there were installments about Paul Manafort’s fishy-looking role, the “grab ‘em by...” moment, Trump’s comments about the “Mexican judge,” and the shift of one-time Trump ridiculers like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell into a Vichy Republican coalition.
Through all the posts, the idea was to record in real time what people knew about Donald Trump, about the country, and about the issues and stakes in the election, before any of us knew how the contest was going to turn out. As I wrote in introducing the very first installment four years ago:
People will wonder about America in our time. It can be engrossing to look back on dramatic, high-stakes periods in which people were not yet sure where things would lead, to see how they assessed the odds before knowing the outcome. The last few months of the 1968 presidential campaign: would it be Humphrey, Nixon, or conceivably even George Wallace? Or 1964: was there a chance that Goldwater might win? The impeachment countdown for Richard Nixon, in 1974? The Bush-Gore recount watch in 2000?
The Trump campaign this year will probably join that list. The odds are still against his becoming president, but no one can be sure what the next five-plus months will bring. Thus for time-capsule purposes, and not with the idea that this would change a single voter’s mind, I kick off what I intend as a regular feature. Its purpose is to catalogue some of the things Donald Trump says and does that no real president would do.
We are again in a not yet sure moment.
- About the upcoming election.
- About the unfolding-by-the-minute consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.
- About the recent collapse of the stock markets, and the less immediately visible, but ultimately far more damaging, economic and social effects of the sudden simultaneous collapse of the travel and lodging industries, of the live-events and sports and conference and entertainment businesses, of restaurants and bars, of taxis and trains, of stores in college towns, and of the impact of all of this on the people who unload baggage from airliners or clean rooms for hotel guests or work as security guards at museums or sell jerseys at baseball games. Such roles are not as resonant as “steelworkers” or “coal miners” in political or journalistic discourse, but these jobs collectively form a very large part of the economy, they’re very hard to do over the internet or “remotely,” and they’re being eliminated at a pace not seen in at least a dozen years, and probably since the 1930s.
We don’t know.
So behind our veil of ignorance about outcomes, this is another chronicle of what we knew and heard day by day, which I’ll intend to operate, as with the original series, through the upcoming election season.
Obviously I am skipping through what would be several decades’ worth of news in normal circumstances: impeachment, the Democratic primaries, the evisceration of legal norms, and so on down a long list.
Instead, for an arbitrary starting point, let’s begin with Trump’s Oval Office address last night on the virus threat. I have experience with this rhetorical form: I wrote a number of such addresses long ago when Jimmy Carter was president, and I have studied dozens of them in the intervening years.
This latest Trump speech was uniquely incompetent and inappropriate, and it’s worth noting why, as American voters decide whether to retain him in office.
One audience that Trump himself takes seriously—the world financial system—obviously took a dim view of his statement, as markets around the world headed sharply downward practically as soon as he began to talk. Of course, their view indirectly affects everyone else.
But from a political, rhetorical, and civic perspective, what was wrong with the speech? While watching it, I was assessing the speech by two standards: What it showed about Trump and his styles of thought, and what it showed about presidents and their roles in similar moments of stress.
As for Trump himself, his public vocabulary is strikingly limited on a deployable-word-count basis: “Many people are saying,” “it’s the greatest ever,” “we have tremendous people,” “very good things are happening,” “there has never been anything like it,” and of course “sir.”
Equally striking is the consistency, or narrowness, of the messages Trump delivers. A huge proportion of his entire discourse can be boiled down to two themes:
I am so great, and am doing a better job than anyone else ever has. (Biggest crowds, best economy, most loyal supporters, etc.)
Other people are such cheaters—and it is outrageous what they are trying to get away with. (They’re sending rapists; they’re behind on their NATO payments; they’re ripping us off in trade; etc.)
I won’t go through the whole classification of his discourse into these two categories, but nearly everything he said last night could be boiled down to one or the other of those themes.
I am so great and am doing the best possible job. (“This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history … Our team is the best anywhere in the world … Because of the economic policies that we have put into place over the last three years, we have the greatest economy anywhere in the world, by far.”)
Other people are mistreating us and are to blame. (Repeated references to the “foreign virus,” banning entry from most foreign nationals who have recently been in Europe, etc.)
Of course, every presidential address in every era has implicitly argued, I am doing a good job. Whether the challenge they’re dealing with is the Great Depression or the 9/11 attacks, Pearl Harbor or the Cuban Missile Crisis, when describing the challenge and their intended response, all presidents are effectively saying: You can feel better about this emergency, because I have a plan.
But until Trump, other presidents have applied the “show, don’t tell” policy when it comes to their own competence. They want to show they are acting the way the country would hope, so they don’t have to say it.
Trump says it himself. He quotes other people saying it about him. And he insists on hearing about his greatness from his retinue—most recently in the fawning statements made by his own vice president and secretary of health and human services, who preface their updates about the virus with North Korean-style compliments for the leader’s far-sighted action.
Five years into Trump’s presence as a foreground political figure, many listeners are inured to the two unvarying notes in his presentations: that what is good has come from him, and what is bad has come from someone else. But the prominence of these two notes in an Oval Office address was a reminder of how much we have learned to overlook. This is not how presidents have ever talked before.
And what about the speech, just as a speech? In my view it had three problems: how it was conceived; how it was written; and how it was delivered. (Plus, a bonus fourth problem I’ll get to at the end.)
How it was conceived: An Oval Office address is by definition about a big problem. (Otherwise, why is a president imposing on our time this way?) And its purpose is to answer several explicit questions: Why did this happen? How bad is it? What are we going to do about it? It also, always, must answer a deeper, broader, and more important question: Will we be OK?
Abraham Lincoln’s First and Second Inaugural Addresses can be thought of as precursors to Oval Office addresses of the broadcast era, and as the ideal form of such speeches, answering all these questions. (Why did this happen? “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war…. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend’ it.” Will we be OK? “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in..”)
Again, that’s the ideal form, but it is one that other presidents have had in mind as the model to work toward. These addresses have been about us, the American family, not about me, the leader. But Trump has only the me note in his vocal and emotional range, except for them as the enemies. He used the word us in the speech, but it was just a word. Audiences swallow a lot of guff from politicians, entertainers, and other public figures. But over time, the public can size up its most familiar performers and recognize which words ring true to them, and which they’re just reading from a script.
And this is entirely apart from the speech’s failure to address the major elephant-in-the-room questions reporters, governors, and public health officials had been asking. Starting with, Why are we so far behind with tests?
How it was written: It was written badly.
How it was delivered: Donald Trump is very effective and entertaining as an unscripted live performer, riffing and feeding off the energy of a crowd. Why does he keep going to big rallies? Partly because the crowds adore him there, and partly because this is what he’s genuinely good at. His rallies—part greatest-hits, part “you have to be there to believe it!” surprises—are great shows. That’s how he commanded so much free airtime on cable TV through 2015 and early 2016: it was the latest must-watch reality show.
But you can’t do that in every speech. And while Trump can still slip a little bit of his rally-meister style into an hour-long State of the Union address, it’s just impossible in 10 minutes behind the Resolute desk. And thus he seemed robotic, even narcotized. Presumably he had seen the text before he encountered it on the TelePrompter—in normal circumstances, a president would have done practice run-throughs many times before the cameras came on. But to judge from his delivery, he was trying to parse his way through sentences he had never seen before. If this seems harsh, compare George W. Bush’s Oval Office address after the 9/11 attacks, or Ronald Reagan’s in 1986 on defense spending and arms-limitation talks.
Bonus: Within an hour of Trump’s speech, other parts of the government were issuing “clarifications” about points he had misstated in his speech. No, not all travel from Europe was suspended. No, the European transit ban did not apply to cargo. No, Americans coming back didn’t need to be screened before reentry. And no, on other points.
Had the need for immediate fact-checking arisen, with any previous Oval Office address? Not that I am aware of. Whatever political party holds the White House and whatever policies these speeches seek to advance, such addresses usually reflect the greatest level of attention to detail that a president’s team can apply. Unfortunately, it probably did so in this case, too.
Twelve hours after Trump’s speech, Joe Biden gave an address that was “presidential,” by the standards listed above. It expressed concern for those suffering in medical, financial, or emotional ways. It laid out what was known and unknown about the challenge. Implicitly, it argued: We will be OK.
What the contrast between the speeches means, politically or in terms of public health, we don’t know at this moment. As of this installment, we know that Donald Trump faced a familiar test of presidential mettle, and badly failed.
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